Category Archives: Weight Loss

Maybe you came here to see if you have diabetes and want to check out the diabetes symptoms?

I made a short video and maybe you would like to read more down below.

Diabetes Symptoms – in Detail

If you have to go to the toilet quite often your body maybe wants to get rid of excess glucose (sugar). The kindneys can filter some sugar out of the bloodstream. But sugar needs to be pretty high before they start to do so.
You can check urine glucose with a glucose stick from your local pharmacy

The same is true if you are constantly thirsty: the water you loose by peeing must come from somewhere 🙂

And dry skin means you may be loosing a lot of water. Why? See above

High levels of glucose make you sleepy and drain energy

If you loose weight for no apparent reason (no diet, no extra sport) you should have your blood glucose checked

With diabetes infects and bad and slowly healing wounds are very likely. Your immune system is weakened

Your breath smells like acetone. This is very severe and mostly restricted to Type 1 diabetics.

Some patients have symptoms like blurry vision, or some tingling in their extremities

If in doubt about any diabetes symptoms check out this page and contact your doctor!

I have been overweight for most of my adult life. Most of the time close to the margin of obesity. As one can imagine I tried a lot of diets and fiddled around a lot with my caloric intake for weight loss.

To start: here are my Withings weight data from the last three months. What worked and what did not?

Weight Chart

Being overweight is no fun for a lot of reasons. So motivation (read: pressure) to get off these extra pounds was quite high.

What did not work for me and why

Formula shake drink diets -> was hungry most of the time, inconvenient as I had to cook a meal in the evening

Extreme low carb, low cal (e.g. Scarsdale Diet) -> energy level dropped too much, was not able to maintain for a longer time

Low fat diet -> often high ammounts of carbs which forced me to increase my anti glucose medication, which leads to more insulin, which probably leads to increased storage of body fat. Worked but was too slow.

Fasting -> managed to do 11 days in a row (and proud of it), lost a lot of weight, regained it in a month

Low Carb, High Fat -> was okay but did not give me any weight loss. But I was able to keep my weight despite lots of fat or oil.

Medication -> I once took Reductil which made me thirsty beyond any comfortable level. And blood pressure went up significantly.

What worked – Managing my calorie intake for weight loss

I simply ate less calories. This sounds unsexy and maybe it is. But if it works for my metabolism, why not?

This the 1970 way of loosing weight – how did I use my 2015 knowledge for improvement?

EODF -> every other day fasting gave me the best and most reliable results. Fasting seems to be good for my body. But I coin the weight loss to the missing caloric input on the combined fasting/eating days. It is the least complicated diet on the planet. In mid January I mostly did EODF which gave me the best results.

Online Resources -> calorie counting is pretty easy today. I use the FDDB-database. It takes five seconds to start the mobile app and scan the barcode to get the full nutritional values of a LOT of foods. Easy.

Mild low carb low cal-> as a type two diabetic my limiting factor are carbs consumed. I take no insulin so every gram has to be balanced by my pancreas. So I keep my carb input as low as possible. Especially in the morning where my blood glucose is high due to the dawn phenomenon. But lowering the carbs alone did not lead to weight loss – I had to cut the calories as well.